Kings Carey is the personal label of James Sparks, the Santa Barbara County winemaker behind Liquid Farm, and it lives in a small storefront on Mission Drive in Solvang where the wine is both poured and made. Sparks works one vineyard block at a time, mostly single variety and single site, with the kind of restraint that lets cool coastal fruit say its own piece. The result is a tight, characterful lineup of Grenache, Syrah, Chardonnay, and a handful of sparkling and white surprises, all built from the marine sites of the Sta. Rita Hills and the wider county.

The story

James Sparks did not grow up around wine. He was raised in Idaho and arrived in the Santa Ynez Valley in 2009, brought west by family, with no plan beyond finding work. The work he found was in cellars. He started as an assistant winemaker at Dragonette Cellars, one of the names that helped define modern Santa Barbara, and learned the trade the way most good winemakers do, by doing the unglamorous parts again and again through harvest after harvest.

In 2013 he took over as the first dedicated winemaker for Liquid Farm, the cult Chardonnay and Pinot Noir house, a job he still holds today. Kings Carey grew out of that life. He launched it in 2016 as a tiny, Grenache-focused side project, something like seventy five cases, named for his two sons. It was the place he could chase the grapes and the ideas that did not fit anywhere else. The label has since grown to roughly nine hundred to twelve hundred cases a year, still small enough that Sparks remains hands on for every lot.

In 2023 he gave the project a real home, opening a combined small-production winery and tasting space in downtown Solvang. It is an unusual setup for the Santa Ynez Valley, a working cellar and a tasting bar under one roof, so the wine you sip was very likely pressed and aged a few steps from where you are standing. Sparks describes his approach as keeping it simple, letting clean fruit and minimal intervention carry the wine rather than the winemaker’s hand.

The place

The backbone of Kings Carey is the Sta. Rita Hills, the cool coastal appellation on the western edge of the Santa Ynez Valley that earned its own AVA status in 2001. This is one of the rare corners of California where the mountain ranges run east to west rather than north to south. Those transverse ranges act like a funnel, pulling Pacific fog and ocean wind straight inland off the cold water, so the vineyards sit in a daily rhythm of morning marine layer and afternoon sun. Temperatures here can swing thirty to forty degrees between day and night, which slows ripening, holds onto acidity, and keeps the wines lifted and alive.

The ground matters as much as the air. The Sta. Rita Hills holds some of the purest deposits of diatomaceous earth on the planet, a chalky fossil soil of ancient sea algae, woven together with sand and marine sediment. Sandy, low-vigor soils drain hard and starve the vines just enough to push small, intensely flavored berries. Much of the Kings Carey fruit comes from Spear Vineyard, a thirty-five acre site inside the AVA planted to Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Syrah, Grenache, and Gruner Veltliner, a vineyard known for the kind of bright, mineral-driven fruit that suits Sparks’ light touch. Other bottlings draw on John Sebastiano Vineyard, Brick Barn in the Santa Ynez Valley, and Chardonnay from the cooler reaches of the Edna Valley to the north.

What they grow and make

Kings Carey began as a Grenache project, and Grenache is still where the label shows its hand. From Spear Vineyard, Sparks makes both a pale, savory Grenache Rose and a perfumed, red-fruited Grenache that leans cool and spice-driven rather than jammy, the Sta. Rita Hills version of a grape more often associated with heat. It is the wine that started everything and still tells you the most about the house style.

Syrah is the other red to seek out. The 2021 Kings Carey Syrah earned 95 points from Decanter, a serious mark for a label this small, and it shows the cool-climate side of the grape, more black pepper, violet, and savory meatiness than sun-baked weight. On the white side there are two Chardonnays, one from Spear Vineyard in the Sta. Rita Hills and one from the Edna Valley, both built for tension and salinity rather than butter and oak. Sparks also bottles a Spear Vineyard Pinot Noir, a Semillon, a Mourvedre, and a Cabernet Franc, plus sparkling wines that include a Rose of Pinot Noir and a Blanc de Noirs. For a project that runs barely over a thousand cases, it is a remarkably curious and wide-ranging lineup, which is the whole point of having a label of your own.

Farming

Kings Carey is a negociant-style label rather than an estate, so the farming story lives in the vineyards Sparks chooses to buy from. He works with sites like Spear that share his cool-climate, low-vigor profile, and some of those bottlings have been made from organically farmed fruit. In the cellar the philosophy is consistent and stated plainly, single variety and single vineyard wherever possible, minimal manipulation, and a refusal to push the fruit past what the season gave him. The wines are meant to be clean expressions of a place and a year, not a winemaker’s signature stamped over the top.

Visiting

Tasting at Kings Carey is intimate and personal, and it doubles as a look inside a real working winery. The Solvang space is by appointment only, which keeps the visit unhurried and often puts you across the bar from Sparks himself or his team. There are two flights to choose from, a four-wine tasting and a six-wine tasting, the larger one folding in the sparkling bottlings.

Because the tasting room is appointment based, the simplest way to drink Kings Carey is to book ahead, join the wine club through the winery, or order the bottles directly from kingscarey.com. The label is small enough that allocations move quickly, so the website and the club are the most reliable path to the wines you taste.

Food pairing

These are food wines first, built around acidity and freshness rather than power, which makes them unusually easy at the table. The cool-climate Syrah, with its pepper and savory edge, is a natural with grilled lamb, duck, or anything off a wood fire, where the smoke meets the wine’s own savory note and the bright acid cuts the fat. The Spear Vineyard Grenache and the Grenache Rose love a Mediterranean table, roasted vegetables, herbed chicken, charcuterie, dishes carried by olive oil and herbs. The salty, high-acid Chardonnays were made for the coast, so pour them with oysters, crab, or simply roasted fish in butter, where the wine’s saline lift resets your palate between bites. For more ideas matched to the bottle in front of you, run your dish through our wine pairing generator.

To go deeper on the region and the grapes behind these wines, explore the Sta. Rita Hills appellation, the wider world of Santa Barbara wine, and our guide to California Pinot Noir, then bring it to the table with the wine pairing generator.

Downtown, the Funk Zone tasting rooms offer a different way to drink Santa Barbara County wine, with producers from every sub-appellation pouring within a few blocks of each other.